(The video can be found here. We'll pretend that's the kill attempt, and not a farm attempt gone horribly wrong.)

I say unexpectedly because even taking into account the largest nerf in the history of the game, the kill for us was about 2 nights away according to my burnt-poop-log calendar. However, evidently "this is the last attempt for tonight, make it count" sometimes has unpredictable results, such as making people mostly-correctly execute a phase that they have never seen before and had no idea what to do in. I know that this is the case because the next week I watched the same exact group make another go at Ragnaros phase 3, and that circus lasted all of 2.5 seconds before everyone was made into hat. Which means, of course, that as always the first kill was a deeply spiritual experience, where powers outside the raid were looking down on us in pity.

So Rag happened to die, and immediately someone said "what about the front page update?" and I was caught with my pants down, figuratively and literally, because as a tank and officer of the guild I am a practitioner of what is known as "socks-only raiding". I scrambled to assemble some reference materials, but after scouring my resources ended up with only a picture of a bear on a bicycle, a pigeon with french fries, and two and a half poop jokes.

See normally, in between front page updates, when I encounter appropriate situations, I write a quick note to myself that I am able to later reference when composing the front page news post. The problem is that these notes tend to be very cryptic and completely meaningless by the time I go back to read them, and therefore useless. For instance, the back of the DKP notebook (which is where these notes reside) currently contains the following:

Squeaky Gnome
Parrot With a Human Face
Me Gusta Duck Roll

And I have NO idea what any of those mean. Or what they could even remotely mean. So I had to scrap all that and come up with some original material before anyone noticed the delay. This was for the most part done this past Saturday, sitting on the train next to a girl with elf ears and a broken leg, which she got defending Helm's Deep, talking to a fat kid with a lazy eye and a cat-ear hat that appeared to be made from several socks cut apart and turned inside out.

Anyway, Firelands. Blizzard's latest feat of raid engineering. This time the mobs from Scholomance Molten Core were copy and pasted so thoroughly that they still reference the "smoldering" mechanic and drop crafting materials from 2004.

The bosses at least were better than Molten Core. Of course this isn't saying too much, since (despite what the 400-pound man with Cheeto-streaks on his moobs will tell you) those were NOT the golden days of raiding and the encounters really only involved healers turning their cameras at the floor and spamming a decurse addon to dispel the raid as fast as the global cooldown will allow. But hey, at least it was better than what came before. Hal the Hunter tells of a time where a cleric in EverQuest had a handful of buffs of varying durations, without any in-game timers, which meant that the player piloting the cleric had to invest in several real-world hourglasses of varying denominations and physically use them to time things. I mean I guess I do that now with coins for the Baleroc rotation, but then everyone complains because they all want to be the quarter because everyone deserves to be rich and they are the 99% and they have the RIGHT to enter a bagel shop and poop in the sink (because the toilet is a stool-volcano due to having been used by more people than Illside's tailpipe) and then have the sink break off the wall because it doesn't support their weight.

I fear that at this point in the post there are too many words and too few pictures, which means we're fast approaching the point where the average reader's attention will be commandeered by a passing slinky. So here's the promised picture of Quasi:

I would NOT look at the source material for this if I were you by the way. What has been seen cannot be unseen, and NEVER have those words rang more true than now. (I KNOW that all of you won't leave me alone until I have furnished a link to this anthropomorphic lesbian squirrel porn (I THINK they are squirrels?), so I'll save us both some time: google "peaches and cream clubstripes" and go to the first result, but remember, you have been WARNED).

Moving on, here we have Detective Mordral, who screens all submitted images to make sure they are legitimate and not simply lifted from the various cesspools of the internet:

This is his "poop face", most often seen right after dying to Alysrazor trash because our cadets are yelling "11121211221" in raid chat instead of turning the bird.

And finally we have one of our newer additions, Hyldra, seen here in bear form:

I hope y'all find this one hilarious by the way, because once SHE sees it I am going to get a reaming worse than the time I played "parachute cat" from the 8th floor balcony.

Anyway, carrying on.

The media has convinced the mothers and the mothers have convinced themselves that all of their children have ADD and so they feed them medicine but this GIVES them ADD and this ADD generation is currently what we have to work with as far as raid groups go. See once upon a time, in the formative years of the guild, we would have intelligent, lengthy strategy discussions about every fight. You can see that there is a special forum for it, an artifact of expansions past, now overgrown with cobwebs from several years of disuse. Here we would discuss knowledge and invent maneuvers and draw colored graphs in our downtime, and in the actual raid I used to go into great detail about the mechanics of an encounter, so that everyone could be well prepared and knew exactly what to expect going into a fight.

These days, the explanation must be condensed to haiku form, or perhaps a picket sign slogan, otherwise I start losing people. I can't even have people go watch a video of the fight, because that inevitably ends with zero knowledge of the encounter and instead people screaming "omg omg Kain can you say "fuwious woar" like she does in that video?! Please? It's ADORABLE!".

On a given progress night we start attempts, and after every attempt I say "we need to spread out more, the fire ability does damage in an area around each person and we are dying because we are too clumped." I say this over and over and pour glasses of wine to lower my blood pressure and somewhere in the neighborhood of attempt 57 someone says "oh! I just noticed that the fire ability is much easier to heal through if we're all spread out!" and I poop myself.

It's like screaming at someone "don't put your hand in that hole there's a badger in there", and then they start to move it inside the hole and you warn them again and again and then you finally leave, and then everyone is surprised when they scream "FUCK A BADGER BIT ME". Now take 25 such individuals, and you got yourself a typical Addiction-Guild raid night. I hate these people. I find them to be similar to an accumulation of feces and lye on a riverbank, fit only to be squatted on and defecated upon by the common troweling animals of the field, the plowbeasts done with tilling visit upon them a worthy reward.

As such the only way to deal with most raiders is to distract them enough so they don't think too much about the task at hand, so that their reptilian brain just does what it heard me repeat several hundred times. In essence it's like putting a tasty snack at the bottom of a tin can, as a trap, which is basically what I would do to interact with girl-cats if I were a cat myself:

Speaking of traps, evidently not everyone is aware of the terminology. Luckily Nevvy is back, so I will allow his words to explain what a thousand pictures of awkward bulges could not:

I guess it's not ALL that bad. For instance, people's brains appear to function mostly along the rules of logic (even the girls'!), unlike the "temperature panel incident" from a few weeks ago.

So Dan's computer has a one of those temperature panel things on the front of the case, that displays useless statistics such as temperature and fan speed. Now, let's ignore for a second the fact that these things have temperature probes consisting of a wire scotch taped to a graphics card or heat sink, and that whatever measurements they provide are about as accurate as trying to predict hurricane trajectories with a butt-thermometer. Instead let's focus on their other feature: the alarm that goes off when the fan speed gets too low or some such shit. Because you know, modern components are definitely not made to shut off before overheating, and require a high-pitched squeal to keep the blood pressure of household children and animals from getting too low.

Anyway. Dan's temperature-monitor-panel begins making the aforementioned squealing sounds for no apparent reason one day, but only when playing games. Dan proceeds with the logical solution, i.e. not playing games. This lasts about 2 days, until Twiller accidentally trolls and Dan is forced to defend his honor in a match of Team Fortress 2. His initial solution, which is to get a new computer overnighted to him, isn't fast enough so he comes to me and Professor MushyBiscuit for help. We explain a series of steps to resolving this problem, which generally involve say, opening the case and unplugging the panel because it's useless anyway.

Except that this solution is not appropriate for Dan's needs, as he is CONVINCED that if he opens the case everything will be destroyed since computers operate with the help of voodoo - you have to remember that this is the same person that once upon a time reformatted his computer in 30 seconds while talking on vent from said computer. No, Dan has a far more elegant solution: see the panel has a sticker with a number of unlabeled squares on the front, which of course MUST be buttons because they are made to look like buttons. The panel has a SECRET CODE that must be entered to unlock special functionality and make the beeping stop. Dan is sure of this, as he has done this once before. The solution then is to google pictures of temperature panels until one is found that resembles the front of his case, and then attempt to look for the secret code on the associated website. Except he knows nothing about computers and is convinced that the websites are written in the language of computer-shaman and he is therefore not able to do this task himself, and requires assistance.

MushyBiscuit, a man with more patience (and a larger stock of amphetamines) than I, actually went on this quest. Naturally it proved fruitless. Last I checked Dan was actually playing the squealing sound over vent to people hoping someone would recognize it and be able to tell him the secret code that will solve his problems.

I cannot make these things up.

The thought processes of these people sometimes make less sense than Frankie Twill having a wife, because THAT MAN is so deep in the closet he's having tea with Aslan the Lion. (Get it?! It's a Narnia reference, because the children go into a closet where all the magical people live. And Frank is a latent homosexual, which means he ALSO hangs out in a closet.)

Until next time, where our heroes go on to vanquish Squid-Deathwing with a laser beam and bring this expansion to a glorious conclusion, hopefully before my brain aborts itself due to seeing one too many geometrically-impossible fire-forests.